By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Major Japanese tech blog TechWave is today running a story on how Japan’s social games market has evolved from 2009 to 2010 and how it will grow until 2014. According to Seed Planning, the market research company behind the analysis, Japan’s social game market grew 305% from 2009 to 2010...
Here is the link to a column I wrote on Japan’s social games sector for the journal for the American Chamber Of Commerce in Japan, covering DeNA (Mobagetown), GREE, Zynga Japan and other things. Excerpt: The market valuation of Zynga, the San Francisco-based company behind Farmville and a host of...
Facebook Japan has sure observed this: Japan’s biggest social network Mixi today announced it has removed the “Search Friends Via Email“ function – after one day. The reason: too many users protested against the new feature because of privacy and security reasons. Mixi now says...
How are Mixi, Facebook Japan, GREE and DeNA (Mobage-town) doing at the moment? Here’s an interesting study released by MMD Research from Tokyo on Japan’s social games market. This graph shows how social networks are used in Japan (green: brand awareness, purple: actual users) This graph...
Currently, it’s 1.5 million people: ;. Facebook translated its UI into Japanese in 2008. For Facebook, Japan is one of the few remaining white spaces on the world map, next to South Korea, Russia, and China (where it’s blocked). By way of comparison: Japan’s homegrown social...
Inception and general approach: You can broadly say that Facebook first copied Friendster (the CEO openly admits this) before going over to Facebook on a regular basis (apps, share function, like function, LBS, real-time elements, feed system, Mixi Connect etc.). Mixi today is Japan’s only...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry